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The View from My Kitchen

Benvenuti! I hope you enjoy il panorama dalla mia cucina Italiana -- "the view from my Italian kitchen,"-- where I indulge my passion for Italian food and cooking. From here, I share some thoughts and ideas on food, as well as recipes and restaurant reviews, notes on travel, and a few garnishes from a lifetime in the entertainment industry.

You can help by leaving comments on posts and by becoming a follower. More than a hundred thousand people all over the world have viewed the blog and that's great. But every great leader needs followers and if I am ever to achieve my goal of becoming the next great leader of the Italian culinary world :-) I need followers! I promise, I'm not going to spam anybody. I'd just like to know who's out there and what your thoughts are on what I'm doing.

Grazie mille!

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Hairy Cooks, Public Health and Public Perception

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far
away, “proper” cooks and chefs, the ones who worked in “nice”
restaurants, were always expected to wear white jackets, clean, crisp
aprons, tall white hats (called “toques”), and, with the
exception, perhaps, of a skinny little mustache, to always be
clean-shaven. Cooks of a “lesser” sort, like the ones found in
greasy spoon diners, usually wore grubby t-shirts, dirty aprons,
paper hats and a perpetual five o'clock shadow. My, how things have
changed!

The ratio of chef jackets (white or
otherwise) to t-shirts (grubby or otherwise) in today's restaurant
industry remains about the same. It's largely a matter of the
establishment's style and the cook's personal taste. Aprons are still
part of the uniform, too. Traditional toques, however, are all but
gone, relegated to the annals of history and the halls of culinary
schools. The tall, white, pleated toque has been replaced by a
variety of headgear ranging from beanies to ballcaps to bandanas. And
sometimes to nothing at all. And therein lies the issue because cooks
are a helluva lot hairier these days than they've ever been in the
past.

Turn on Top Chef,
Hell's Kitchen, or
Chopped and you'll see what I
mean. Long hair, frizzy hair, curly hair, spiky hair and beards that
rival ZZ Top or those Duck Dynasty guys.
All of it gloriously unbridled and unrestrained. Even clean-shaven
men with average length hair go uncovered in the kitchen. And despite
the fact that these are supposed to be “reality” shows, that's
not really reality. Every time I watch one of those programs where
some guy cooks with a mop on his head and a beard hanging down to his
knees, I say the same thing: “I'll bet he doesn't get away with
that in a real kitchen.”

Public health codes
in every state contain some variation on the verbiage “food
employees shall wear hair restraints such as hats, hair coverings or
nets, beard restraints, and clothing that covers body hair, that are
designed and worn to effectively keep their hair from contacting
exposed food.” And I know this section of code is enforced because
a quick scan of restaurant inspections in my area turned up the
violation “all food employees must wear effective hair restraints
when working around food” numerous times. I once fired a guy who
refused to keep his head covered in my kitchen. I wasn't about to let
the twerp cost me a point off my inspection grade just because he
didn't like hats. My cooks could always tell when I was getting ready
to cook something myself because I kept a cap under the counter and I
put it on whenever I headed into the kitchen.

So
what's so bad about hair, anyway? Technically, nothing. The
FDA doesn't even place a limit on strands of hair per plate. (It
does, however, allow up to two maggots per can of tomatoes.) People
who study such things say hair is made of a densely packed protein
called keratin, which is chemically inactive and won't cause any
problems if digested. It's possible that staph bacteria, which can
upset the stomach and bring on a case of diarrhea, could hitch a ride
on a strand of hair, but it's highly unlikely that the tiny amount of
staph that can hide on a hair or two is going to be enough to lead to
gastrointestinal problems. Add that to the fact that the FDA has
never received a report of anyone getting ill from ingesting hair
found in food, and you have to ask yourself “what's the big deal?”

Well.....it's gross, right? Like major
league, instinctively, viscerally, makes you choke to think about it
gross. I don't know of
anybody who doesn't react with revulsion to finding a hair in their
food. It's science versus psychology. The eggheads can tell me all
day long that eating a hair in my scrambled eggs isn't going to hurt
me, and the intellectual me agrees. But the me whose gag reflex
developed at my clean-freak mother's knee just says, “Oh, HELL no!”
Most people refuse to eat the rest of a dish once a hair is
discovered. Some stalwarts just pick out the offending strand and
keep on going, but the average person's appetite is effectively
quashed. I knew somebody who tossed an entire batch of cookies
(literally, not colloquially) because a hair turned up in one cookie.
Overkill? Probably. But people just feel that strongly about it.

And for some
reason, a lot of people think of facial hair as being “dirtier”
than head hair. That's generally not true. Chemically, it's the same
stuff. And as far as cleanliness goes, guys who wear beards are
usually pretty fastidious about them. They wash them and oil them and
comb them and baby them. It's a fashion statement, after all, and who
wants to make a dirty fashion statement? Besides, if a guy's beard is
going to be smelly and nasty........well, it's right there under his
nose, you know? But again, it's psychological. I don't care how clean
and oiled and combed some dude's beard is, I don't want him dragging
it through my soup. Or leaving parts of it therein.

Most health codes
state that a beard must be restrained in a net of some sort if it
“hangs off the face.” I have a beard. It's a close-cut goatee
that I've had for most of the last thirty years. My son has a similar
affectation. Neither of us restrain our chin curtains in the kitchen
because, in my case anyway, the hair on my chin is shorter than my
eyebrows are getting to be. Talk about restraining facial hair!
Remember Larry Hagman and Andy Rooney? There are a lot of old guys
out there who should be sporting eyebrow nets. Anyway, my beard
doesn't “hang” so it remains unfettered. Unfortunately, these
days a lot of cooks who look like they're auditioning to be one of
the “Smith Brothers” – especially the brother on the right –
are running around kitchens with their beards flying free.

Part of the problem
is that nobody wants to look stupid. And, I'm sorry, but beard nets
look stupid. Period. My supply catalogs are full of catchy, sporty,
cool and attractive ways to cover your noggin. But there ain't
nothin' cool or sporty about a beard net. They're ugly, silly,
unwieldy, and uncomfortable and nobody in their right mind wants to
wear one. So by and large they don't. Regardless of comfort or
appearance, though, customers are frequently turned off by heavily
bearded cooks. Here are a few comments I gleaned while researching
the topic:

I want my chefs either clean-shaven
or with beards clipped close. Anything else IS unhygienic. That beard
hair I consume with my soup may not cause illness, but that shouldn't
be the threshold for determining policy.

Gross gross gross thinking that one
of those beard hairs ends up on the food.

Unsanitary pigs.

A long beard that is not symmetrical
or otherwise trimmed says to me "I am too lazy to take care of
myself and I really don't care what anyone thinks" which is not
the message I want to hear about who has been handling my food before
I eat it.

Just shave, already. I don't care
how much you groom beforehand, restaurant kitchens are hot, sweaty
places and the image of a big old beard hanging down is just gross.

Who knows what's living in those
beards! Seriously chef(s) cut them back a little cause it's
unsanitary!

Unsanitary pigs? I don't know if I'd go
that far. But when some of these tattooed wooly-boogers set out to
make a “statement,” they need to realize that in many people's
minds, that's the statement they're making.

I guess when it comes down to it, it's
as much about public perception as it is about public health.
Restaurants don't get “fined” in monetary terms for health code
violations, they just get points deducted from their grade score.
That score gets posted and, believe me, people notice. They also
notice slovenly looking cooks and servers. There were a couple of
young cooks working in a place I took over that did a pretty good job
with the food, but they were perceived by customers as being slobs
because they were unkempt, unshaven, didn't keep their heads covered,
and wore the crotch of their pants down around their knees. There
were a lot of complaints and when I came in and brought a
professional dress code to the kitchen, they didn't make the cut.
Good enough cooks, nice enough guys, but people didn't want them
cooking their food, and at the end of the day, customers vote with
their wallets and with their feet.

I've got nothing against hair. At my
age, I'm glad to have it. And I'm okay with beards. I've had my
facial fuzz for a long time and I intend to keep it. But in a
professional setting where appearance makes a difference, I keep my
hair covered and my beard short and trimmed. Nobody has ever found a
hair in anything I've cooked and they never will. None of my kitchens
have ever been dunned by an inspector for hair restraint violations,
and they never will. If you're an up and coming cook who wants to
establish a “personal style,” just do it with your food and keep
your hair out of it. So to speak. If your “personal style” is
such that you can't conform to code and to the expectations of your
customers, maybe you should be “styling” in a profession where it
doesn't matter.

Who Am I (and Why Should You Care)?

I've been around long enough to know a little bit about a lot of things. That said, there are a couple of things I know a little bit more about; food and entertainment.

I've been cooking since I was a kid -- a very long time, indeed -- and I've spent most of my adult life in the entertainment industry.

I've been writing about one or the other of these topics since the '80s, and I have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers over the years. I also spent the better part of two decades behind a microphone as the host of my own radio talk show.

Does all of this make me an expert? Nah! But I'm certainly entitled to my opinion -- and so are you! :-)